Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for providing customer service to website users.
Description of Related Art
As the Internet grows, the Internet has become a major vehicle for transportation of information regarding products and services. This arises because a person can easily obtain information on a variety of products and services from different vendors via the Internet. Hence many Web sites are becoming connected and more corporations are trying to do business on the “Web”. Actually, the World Wide Web (WWW), which is now more often abbreviated as the “Web”, has become an increasing popularity entertainment and information medium for consumers. The popularity of the WWW has led to the commercialization of this new medium. As credit card security problems are being resolved, the area of electronic sales or Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) has been developing rapidly. The new and exciting point about e-commerce is the ability of every one, almost anywhere on the globe to which a Web connection is available, to access any commercial business offerings catalog implemented as a Web site. Moreover, the user can access this service anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, the WWW has become a significant commerce of E-commerce. Venders offer goods and services for sale via various WWW sites.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,149, the contents of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, the prior art provides a virtual sales person who is capable of assisting a computer user to complete an on-line sales transaction in a substantially similar manner as a human sales representative. A common practice world in actual physical stores is to have sales representatives or sales persons. These sales representatives or sales persons can help a customer to understand the product and its benefit to the customer, as well as enabling customer to find the needed product quickly. Additionally, the sales representatives or sales persons can advise the customer on the product related issues. Since the sales representative is also an employee of the store, the sales representative should also promote certain products according to the interest of the business and also sell as many products as possible. Unfortunately, when the customer wishes to buy a product through the Internet, only a menu and pictures are shown. No advice, no knowledge, no expertise, no confidence in the purchase is provided. One solution would be to add the Sales Representative function to the Internet virtual store. Currently, the merchant would need to hire 3 staff of human representatives for a 7 day work week, including holidays. Then, the merchant would need a chat system in a call center of some sort for enabling communication from these “human Sales Representatives to the users over the Web. Thus, this solution is difficult and expensive to implement. Therefore, in this invention, a virtual sales representative is provided for interacting with a customer browsing a virtual store Web site. However, the number of users is limited substantially only by the capacity of the server itself because the system is installed in a Web server and preferably serves many users simultaneously. The technology is constrained to being used in low volume sites. The problem that needs to be solved while catering to these sites is that while every attempt must be made to provide virtual sales person who is capable of assisting a computer user to complete an on-line sales transaction in a substantially similar manner as a human sales representative, it is virtually impossible to proportionally increase the capacity of the server itself to correspond to the number of simultaneous visitors on a high-volume website that could easily be a few tens of thousands of customers.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,976,056, the contents of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, there is an alternative technique to provide a system for establishing a live contact between visitors to a website and a representative of the company or organization or individual whose website is being visited. The invention combines the Web with instant message to allow website operators to monitor in real-time how many people are visiting sections of their website, from where and for how long and to proactively approach the visitor with an instant message, thereby engaging the visitor in a dialog with the company representative. The problem that needs to be solved while catering to these sites is that while every attempt must be made to provide website operators to monitor in real-time how many people are visiting sections of their website, from where and for how long and to proactively approach the visitor with an instant message, it is virtually impossible to proportionally increase the capacity of the server itself and sales representatives to monitor the website to correspond to the number of simultaneous visitors on a high-volume website that could easily be a few tens of thousands of customers. The technology is constrained to being used in low volume sites, simply because they require dedicated sales representatives to monitor the website in order to decide which users need to be offered customer service in a proactive manner.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,976,056, there is an alternative technique to provide a priority-based system wherein Web site visitors are assigned Quality Points based on their interaction with the Web site in order to correctly identify the best users on a Web site that are most likely to generate sales, or are most needy of customer service. Hence the technology can adequately addresses the needs of high volume sites that wish to be proactive in the sale of high margin/cost products. In addition, the invention can provide the intelligent and timely allocation of appropriate Customer Service Representatives (or alternate service mechanisms) by matching a customer's behavioral patterns to the right Customer Service Representative (or other service agent) at the right time to achieve higher levels of customer service. The invention maybe cannot face the problem that it is virtually impossible to proportionally increase the volume of real staff to correspond to the number of simultaneous visitors on a high-volume website that could easily be a few tens of thousands of customers while every attempt must be made to provide proactive (Merchant-driven) customer service and sales. However, in this invention, the system and method just focus on providing sales and customer service to the top 2% of online customers and preferably the top 5%, or top 10% of Web site visitors that can be convinced to buy products online and potentially become paying customers. Besides, the number of users is limited substantially only by the capacity of the server itself because the system is installed in a Web server and preferably serves many users simultaneously. Hence, in this invention, the system and method also face the problem that the system needs enough capacity of the server to monitor the website to correspond to the number of simultaneous visitors on a high-volume website that could easily be a few tens of thousands of customers. It is virtually impossible to proportionally increase the capacity of the server itself and sales representatives to monitor the website to correspond to the number of simultaneous visitors on a high-volume website that could easily be a few tens of thousands of customers.